The dark sky overhead threatens snow as I walk the nearly deserted streets. Ominous gray buildings with their unlit windows reflect the steely sky, glowering down at me. Out of nowhere, a lone man rushes by, I can’t see what he looks like, the collar of his long wool coat pulled up to hide his face. He moves close enough that I hear his accented whisper, “Go home, this place is not for you.”

That was winter 1980 in a city that no longer exists today. Well, it does exist, but not its name, East Berlin. This is the real story of how I found myself in a city surrounded by razor wire and land mines.

Copenhagen

I spent my final year of college in Copenhagen, Denmark, a fantastically beautiful city, full of charm and history. In between semesters, many of the foreign students traveled, bought ridiculously affordable Eurail passes and used them to go as far and as wide a possible during the two week break. I went with a friend to Germany, along the Rhine visiting castles and breweries. We parted ways to travel alone and increase the adventure. You meet people when you travel alone; you have to, or you go crazy. I learned quickly that language isn’t the biggest barrier to communication, fear is. I found that if you try to talk to someone, whether you know their language or not, you can communicate pretty well.

So somewhere in Western Germany at a youth hostel on my winter break, I decided to go to Berlin. Sounded good, why not. After World War II, Germany was divided into two countries, West Germany and the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), or East Germany, as everyone outside of the country called it. They were still divided in 1980 and I wanted to see the scary half. West Germany was like the rest of Europe, easy travel, friendly people and they honored my Eurail passes. But East Germany was verboten, off limits, a Soviet state, unknown and tempting. So crazy 20 year-old me had to go.

By this point in my European travels, I had been to Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, also Soviet block countries. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think I had a sense all of this would disappear in time, the separateness, the old countries held onto with the iron grip of the USSR. And I wanted to see it before it went away.

Berlin

Berlin, the giant decadent German metropolis, was also split into East and West, a city arbitrarily cut in half. The strange thing about this arrangement was that West Berlin being in the Eastern part of Germany was surrounded by East Germany, essentially an island in another country. So when I and my fellow travelers took the train from Western Germany to West Berlin, we traveled through miles and miles of East Germany. The train was like a space craft, rushing through the forbidden void, where we were allowed to breathe the air, look out the window, but nothing more.

The train stopped just before entering Berlin in a kind of special security station. The doors were not opened and no one was allowed off the train. Soon, black uniformed police officers and dogs (yes, German Shepherds) worked their way through the compartments, inspecting bags, lifting seats and pulling parts of the ceiling down looking for illegal and smuggled substances, drugs I assumed, since I didn’t speak any German.

After an hour or so of this unnerving experience, the train continued on to Berlin. It was about 4 in the afternoon, in late December, and like most of Central Europe in the winter, dreary and cold, but it wasn’t dark. Berlin was brilliantly lit and lively. That was a long time ago, but I assume it is even more so today. A big lively, energetic city in the middle of this other country. It was a strange feeling, like they were trying to make up for their oppressed brethren by being even livelier than they had to be. “Party like it’s 1999” and all that.

I didn’t have much money, so I stayed in some youth hostel or cheap hotel. The next day, I went to the American Embassy to get a visa to visit East Berlin, that’s why I came all this way after all. The young woman at the window asked me why I wanted to do that, did I have family, business, diplomatic interests? Nope, I just wanted to see it. “Are you sure?” She asked. “Yeah, I’m sure.” I replied, not at all sure. I gave them the $25 and got a huge colorful stamp in my passport that allowed me 24 hours in East Germany. “Be sure to be back before your visa expires.” She warned me. “What happens if I don’t make it in time?” I asked. “Just be back.” She said seriously.

Berlin Wall

Of course, I didn’t have a car and you can’t exactly hitch-hike across a mine field, so I walked. This part of my travels was worth the entire trip. Forget East Germany, Berlin, lights, and whatever was on the other side of that high cinder-block wall, just walking through a military check point will satisfy almost any travel junky.

If you are under 40 years old, you may have no idea what I’m talking about, but try to understand, West Berlin was big and exciting, tall buildings, music, food, beer, you know, a modern energetic city. And East Berlin was the complete opposite, gray and dark, no lights, low rise, oppressive Soviet style buildings and probably (just to torture the Germans) bad beer. Berlin is built on a slight hill, West Berlin was on the upper slope, so those in the Eastern half could see it, look up at all that shiny fun, they just couldn’t get there. That was just cruel.

Checkpoint Charlie

Friedrichstrasse or Checkpoint Charlie was one of the pathways from West to East. That’s what it was called before they pulled it all down and rejoined the two German halves back together in 1990. The two cities were divided by a tall, ugly cinder-block wall covered in graffiti on the eastern side. It was topped with razor wire and broken glass. After that, a wide, dead stretch of land filled with land mines ended in a tall chain-link fence, and also topped with razor wire, and you were on the western side of the city. Every 100 feet or so, a tower rose along the fence, each housed with soldiers armed with search lights and automatic rifles, and probably heavier weapons. Imagine guards in a prison tower and multiply that by 10. Checkpoint Charlie was the route through this dead zone. It was designed for vehicles, zigzagging, so you couldn’t force your way through. As I walked through this maze of soldiers and concrete, my visa and passport was checked three times. I was frisked, smelled by dogs, asked several times what my business in East Berlin was, and reluctantly allowed into the other side.

Checkpoint Charlie

Suddenly, and anti-climatically, I found myself in East Berlin with no plan, and no idea that my American passport with its current and legitimate visa was probably worth killing for. Only looking back now, do I realize how foolish and dangerous my actions had been. That scary wall and field of landmines was there for a reason, and people died regularly trying to cross it into West Berlin. But God protects children and stupid tourists.

East Berlin

They made me convert 100 of my precious US dollars into East German Marks. Two problems with that, 1) nothing to buy, and 2) you couldn’t take the currency out when you left. This was becoming an expensive trip for a poor college student. But I plunged on, there must be something to do here, it was a pretty big city after all. I walked into the bleak streets of East Berlin, heavy dark buildings greeted me on the wide boulevards, but there are no shops or restaurants, and more strange than that, no people. Everyone must be inside hiding from the KGB or something. I walked on, but the landscape didn’t change much and it was cold. No benches, no cafes or bookstores, no castles or even churches. This is where bad tourists go after they die, those who didn’t lead a good enough life to get into Paris. I looked back and there was West Berlin rising above on its hill, all lights and fun, and more importantly right now, food.A little bored, but not ready to give up, I walked on. That’s when the stranger passed me. “Go home, this place is not for you.” He said in a thick German accent, gone before I even understood what he had told me.

In that moment, I realized where I was and what danger I might be in. This stranger, too afraid to even slow down and talk to me, had warned me. It was like a scene out of a Cold War spy novel. I immediately turned around and walked back toward the transfer building, constantly looking over my shoulder, starting at shadows or any stray movement. An hour later, I arrived, relatively safe in the eastern check point building . There were lots of soldiers, and thankfully a diner. I spent as much of my play money on the food as I could. Unfortunately, it was as cheap as it was terrible. I gave up and went back through Check Point Charlie, somewhat disappointed and tired.

The thing about travel adventures is that they are always better in remembrance than at the time. I didn’t really give the experience much thought in my two days in Berlin, but only later when I saw myself standing in that empty bleak city with the gray sky. Everything about it was oppressive, as if it were designed to crush the spirit of all who lived there. I’ll never forget the feeling of that city, or the man’s voice who warned me.

Colors, the book

Prologue:

I told you this story so I could explain where ideas come from. This experience gave me the idea for a short story I titled, Gray, which I wrote 30 years later. While writing it, I hadn’t realized where I had seen the gray city or the steel sky of my story. But it had stayed in my consciousness, all those years, like a seed waiting patiently to germinate. That year, I wrote eight more short stories and combined them into a book called Colors. Only looking back now, as I write this, do I realize that all of it, the experience, the stories, even this essay is an attempt to understand and describe the feeling of East Berlin on that winter day, so long ago.

It was the late 1980s. I found myself on the island of Maui, HI after a failed marriage, a ton of world travel, and a series of dead-end jobs. It is a beautiful place to live, warm and friendly, but life tends to leak out through the coconut shavings if you don’t pay attention. Serving grilled Mahi Mahi and Mai Tais to pink-skinned tourists was not exactly how I envisioned making my great mark on the planet.

Millions of years ago, the island of Maui emerged from the ocean as two volcanoes, one now extinct and the other dormant, with a wide valley spreading between them. The two mountains couldn’t be more different; the smaller, older peak, Pu’u Kukui is choked with a blanket of thick, impenetrable foliage, where it rains virtually every day. To the east, Haleakala towers over its older brother, nearly twice as high at 10,000 feet, a massive barren desert wasteland at its peak.

I worked at the Maui Intercontinental Hotel as a waiter, bored and mildly depressed most of the time. One evening after watching a spectacular sunset over the ocean, I swore I’d do something spontaneous (and stupid), to shake up my life. I turned my back to the silver-blue of the ocean and looked up to the towering volcano of Haleakala looming high above. “Hell, I’ll hike through the crater tonight.” I told myself.

I was an avid hiker, and had done the hike before – during the day of course, like all sane people. But it was a full moon that night, what could be better. I grabbed a single bottle of water, my beat-up tennis shoes, a windbreaker and threw them into my car and took off. Now this wasn’t just any car, but a Maui beater, as the locals called it. The previous owner had “sawed” the roof off of an old two door Ford Mustang to make it into a convertible. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I bought it for $800. It rains a lot in Hawaii and metal rusts when it gets wet, salt air speeds up that process – a lot. The floorboards had mostly rotted out and you could see the road speeding by under your feet in places, so you had to be careful how you stepped into the car. You didn’t want to fall through the floor, or run with the car like the Flintstones. To stay dry in the car when it rained, I simply drove faster.

It’s also warm in Hawaii, all year round, day and night. Like most of the people living there, I only wore my shoes to hike or work, otherwise it was flip flops, shorts and a tee shirt. A cold day was when you had to shut the windows, and that was only a few times a year. Haleakala is high enough to have a completely different climate, however. I hadn’t thought about that when I left the warm tropical night by the ocean.

Halfway up the mountain I felt the temperature dropping, not too bad at first, just colder. I flipped on the heater in my car (which I’d never used before) and I was fine. About three quarters of the way up it started to rain lightly; I sped up a little so it went over the windshield. Another few miles up, the rain turned to sleet, then to hail, and finally to honest-to-god snow. Really, snow, in Hawaii.

I thought seriously about turning back then; challenging oneself is a great thing and all, but not in shorts and a windbreaker. I was feeling sorry for myself though, and decided I needed a little more misery, so I plowed on. It was about 10 at night when I finally arrived at the top of Haleakala. A thick slushy layer of snow greeted me when I stepped out of my car in the empty parking lot. The wind was howling and cold, just above freezing.Haleakala is a huge mountain, nearly 100 miles in circumference at its base. The top is a blown out volcano crater, proud on one side and dropping away to the sea on the right. The rim rises again on the left to about 8,000 feet. The trail I was going take crosses the mouth of the crater, down the sloping rim dropping 3,500 feet to the valley floor, then follows that about eight or nine miles, then up, climbing steeply for about 2,000 feet and out of the crater. The total hike is about 12 miles. The tourist guides like to give you comparisons about the size of the crater, telling you it is large enough to swallow the entire island of Manhattan including the skyscrapers with room to spare. From the rim you can see what look like tiny volcanoes, cinder cones, dotting the crater floor. Those tiny volcanoes are actually quite large up close, some rising well over 200 feet high. And everything in there is colored charcoal or burnt-red like Beelzebub’s garden in Hell.

My tennis shoes squeaked as I sloshed though the melting snow and sleet to the mouth of the crater and to the trail-head. I leaned over the rim of the crater, the raging wind holding me up as I stared down into that frozen maw. “This is nuts!” I shouted, but my life was nuts. Overhead, angry clouds whipped by, threatening to pummel me with more snow and rain. In the daytime, on a nice sunny day, this was a 7-hour hike. I had worked all day and was already cold and getting numb (remember the shorts and tee-shirt). But something had driven me to this moment; so I closed my I eyes and asked, begged really, “What do I do?”

The answer came immediately, a single word, so clear I didn’t dare question it. “Trust.” I walked face first into that gale, the tiny bits of snow stinging my suntanned face. But as soon as I dropped a few feet into the crater, the wind stopped completely. It must be the wall of the crater blocking the wind, I thought. Then, as miraculously, the clouds overhead split and dissipated as if I were watching a time-lapse film. The full moon burst out and bathed the world in a thousand shades of silver. All my fear and doubt evaporated as I fell to my knees in gratitude. “Thank you.” I offered simply. “Thank you for my life.”

I began walking now, following the well-worn trail, buoyed and energized by the gift of this single word and this amazing night. The volcanic soil crunched reassuringly under my feet with every step. Sometimes I would stand very still, holding my breath and listen. Nothing. It was so quiet my ears would ring, and my own heartbeat sounded like a drum in the unearthly silence.

The descent to the crater floor took about two hours. Little grows in this barren moonscape with the exception of a rare succulent called the silversword plant, which grows nowhere else in the world. My timing was excellent and I was able to see some of them flowering, blossoms glowing silver in the moonlight, jutting skyward on a single thick stock as wide and tall as a man. I passed dozens of these magnificent plants along the trail, each more beautiful than the last.

A couple of miles along the crater floor, about 1 or 2 in the morning, heavy clouds moved in and it grew quite dark. At this point in the trail, there was a very important junction that I mustn’t miss. One way led up and out of the crater, my destination. The other led down and out the far side of the island through a dense rain forest ending at the ocean more than 20 miles away, to the rural, lightly inhabited far side of the island 60 miles away from where I lived. I didn’t have any food and just this one, nearly empty bottle of water. The wrong route would have made for two very long and miserable days.

Kaupo Gap, Haleakala

The ground was hard, dense volcanic rock, which didn’t show my tracks or the trail. I was lost. I spiraled out from where I stood trying to regain the trail. Nothing. The voice came to me again. “Rest,” it said. So I did. I lay on the hard ground and slept for about half an hour. I felt better when I got up and looked around for the trail again. There! Not the trail, but a single set of footprints, seemingly out of nowhere in a patch of soft volcanic dust. I followed them back to the main trail. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Never mind. Think what you like, but I choose to believe in angels that night.

Everything was glorious after that. A light mist began falling which created a moon-bow high overhead. I had never seen or even heard of such a thing, a monochrome rainbow that circled the full moon, shining a dozen shades of silver. All of this beauty for one lone man in the middle of the night, in this gigantic, empty landscape, a dot of land in the vast Pacific Ocean. It was overwhelming.

Hours later, I arrived at the final leg of the trail, a series of steep switchbacks up the far crater rim and out along a thin saddle-back. This is the most spectacular part of the hike, a naked ridge. One side drops down and away into the crater from where I came; the other side sweeps far down to the ocean 8,000 feet below. It is like straddling a knife’s edge in the sky. The moon was just setting into the ocean horizon to my left as the sun rose out of the sea to my right. It was and is the most magnificent thing I have ever seen.

I lingered on that ridge for a time, exhausted and elated at the new day, and the end of my long and magical night. I said good-bye to Haleakala and my melancholy that day, realizing that life had been showering me with beauty and magic all along; I had only to open my eyes to it.

I moved away from Maui a few months later, my mind made up to face the world and all the mysteries I could embrace. I gave my “convertible” away when I left the island, careful to warn the new owner, “Don’t drive too fast over bumps, it might break in half.”

There has been a lot of hand wringing over the state of book publishing the last several years. Large publishing houses in financial distress and complaints that online giants like Amazon are undercutting the industry. Add to that the many, many books now being self-published in print and digitally (many of low quality) and it is overwhelming for readers, making it difficult to choose what to read. Most readers, when in doubt, stick to their favorite authors. That’s pretty safe, but what if you want to reach out, try something new, where do you look?

Just a few decades ago, the book publishing industry was a kind of a closed club, with a handful of publishers controlling the vast majority of new books released. They decided what books we saw on the shelves of bookstores and what books were presented to critics. The choices were safe, books that would sell in the tens of thousands and appeal to a lot of readers. When The New York Times would put a book on its best seller list, that author was guaranteed success. Pretty simple, but also pretty stifling if your audience was small.

That was Before the Floodgates were Opened

Fast forward to 2015. Anyone can publish a book the instant they finish writing it. It doesn’t have to be edited, reviewed, or even spell checked. Just press the publish button and up it goes onto Amazon, a Blog, Smashwords, or wherever. Just like that, you are a published author. That’s good for the author, bad for the old publishing industry and difficult for readers.

How do you Find a Single Diamond in a Sea of Glass?

I love listening to audiobook. Recently, I started reviewing them for a web site called AudioBookReviewer.com so I could hear new titles. Like all things, a few books are very good, many are OK, and some are just horrible. It got me thinking about how the democratization of the web has made too many things available, but also how it helps us sift through huge amounts of choices with relative ease.

Amazon.com is a good example here. Let’s say you’re looking for a new gift for a child, you type in a general idea of what you want, then narrow it down to one of the products that looks good. Now you choose which brand. If you’re like me, you read the reviews. Let’s say there are 400 reviews; that’s good, they probably can’t fake that many. Maybe you look at the one star reviews first. Did the toy break the first day, shatter in the toddler’s mouth and choke him to death, or are the reviewers just whiners who hate anything with blue in it. And you pick. For the most part, you do fine, and your baby makes it to his second birthday without lead poisoning.

Books are not quite there yet, but this is the same process. Someone like me reads or listens to many books and “grades” them one to five stars. One for awful, five for Tolstoy. You like what I’ve reviewed in the past and perhaps follow my choices forward. Multiply this by thousands of reviewers and we get through the tens of thousands of new books together – kind of.

Here’s the big problem. The review system is rigged, loaded with lies. How do I know? Because I listen to horrible books that have five star ratings. Five stars is a perfect book, something that should move us to tears or rapture, Melville or Hugo. Right? There is nothing to stop authors from getting friends or family to load great reviews for their book. We all know this and try to sift through, but it messes up the system. The truth is, it’s not so different from what the publishing industry has done to us for decades, just more obvious and not so professional.

Be Patient

This organic system of review and selection is new, still being polished and perfected. Wikipedia, just a few years ago, was not the reliable, trusted source it is today. Anyone could post some trivia or undocumented statement diluting the quality of the whole. But through a series of checks and self-policing policies, it has become quite good (not flawless), but truly amazing in its scope and general accuracy, which you can verify yourself. No printed encyclopedia can come close to this towering online reference resource.

I chose to review audiobooks, not printed ones, because there is a higher barrier to entry. Audiobooks aren’t inexpensive to produce and this requires the author/publisher to put more effort into the quality of their book before they release it. I like websites like AudioBookReviewer.com because they tend to review the book, more than critique them. In other words, the reviewer gives an overview of the book even if he or she doesn’t like it personally, often going into great detail. In fact, you might choose to listen to a book I didn’t like for whatever quirky thing that bugged me, but you look for in books. A critique on the other hand, gushes over great books and shreds a bad one. You love or hate it, which doesn’t really help you sift through the many books that you might enjoy for a light read. Think of movie reviews here.

The Future is Bright for Book Publishing

A large publisher, no matter how good or how much they like a new book, will not publish it if the audience is too small. It just isn’t worth it. This is not true for self-publishing. Now there is a way for the many strange and wonderful books that would never see the light of day a decade ago, to find their small, but discerning audience. This is great news for you the reader, especially, if you are like me and love the rare and unusual.

Like this:

The orbital sander buzzes, sawdust flying everywhere, making me wonder how my odd journey brought me to this moment. I’m a middle-aged bald guy with two teenagers, living in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, a former art gallery owner and art dealer, wearing a respirator and headphones sanding a lowly piece of poplar, not cherry or walnut or even maple – poplar, the weed of the tree kingdom – and loving every second of it.

My wife is a very successful artist. Her works have been exhibited in Aspen, Vail, New York, Houston, Geneva, Gstaad, Singapore, Mexico City, Toronto, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Miami and many more fancy cities. Am I bragging about her? Of course, what kind of husband would I be if I didn’t. The thing is, her works are complex, really complex. They are essentially layers of antique objects, butterflies, doll furniture, clocks, toys, silverware, wasp nests, eggs, bones, shells, sand, beetles, and whatever else she thinks of, sandwiched between sheets of acrylic. I tell you all this, because I am the one who gets to make the boxes and frames that hold them all together. And I do mean “gets to,” because even though I can’t tell anyone, I secretly love it.

Since I was a kid, I loved to build things—and ahem—take things apart. I took lots of things apart, things you aren’t supposed to take apart. I grew up in a time when TVs were giant polished wooden boxes that took two strong men to lift, full of burning-hot tubes, leaky capacitors, heavy transformers, and scary warnings on the back that said, “Danger High Voltage, Do Not Open.” Yep, I opened the TV, took all the tubes out without any clue how they were supposed to go back. Dad loved that when he got home to sit on the couch in front of the TV. I took apart the clock radio, the mechanical curtain rods, the door locks, the iron, the car door, the coffee percolator, my bicycle, the lawn mower, the electrical outlets (zap!), and anything else with screws or bolts. Most of it I got back together before mom found out, except for some things that went over my head, like the TV.

Have you ever seen those books “How Things Work?” I never read those books. Instead I reverse engineered everything to learn how it worked, I guess I still do. I have a curiosity about mechanical objects, especially broken ones. I am sure everything can be fixed with enough patience and superglue. But I grew up and taking apart the toaster is not much of a profession. Instead, I joined my father in his gallery in New York, then went on my own,for over 30 years now, showing and selling fine art. Don’t get me wrong, I get a charge out of that too. I really love great art, fall in love, heart pounding passionate love with it. How do you mix these two opposites together? Lots of patience apparently.

My wife wasn’t an artist when I met her. She worked for me at my art gallery in Aspen, where we fell in love at first sight. Yes it happens, and it happened to us. Her parents are artists and so it was logical for her to work in the arts, sell it if you can’t make it. She did this with me until her 39th birthday when she woke up one morning and said, “I have to create something or I’ll explode.” I didn’t want her to explode, so I cleared out the garage and told her to go for it. Next thing I know, she’s selling masterpieces and I’m sanding poplar.Now here’s the secret part (well not anymore, I guess), that juvenile-delinquent mechanical engineer was still living inside me. And he was anxious to start taking stuff apart again. Oh sure, I got to fix the vacuum cleaner once in a while, but that’s pretty pedestrian, pull out the dog hair and they call you a genius. My wife’s art is way, way more satisfying than that, like when she decided to put a music box in the middle of one of her pieces. Which has to work, you know, wind up and play. It’s buried inside a work of art, two feet away from the edge of the frame and has to be wound up! I grumbled out loud about the misery and tedium of making something so preposterous work, but inside, I rubbed my hands together in pure mad-scientist glee, carefully containing the sound of my insane laughter.

One of my favorite pieces, called “Cherished Memories of Cornell’s Lost Muse” has a whole set of doll furniture along the inside bottom edge of the frame. How do you get toothpick thin table legs to stay on a piece wood that has to be turned upside down, shipped, handled, and horror of horrors, possibly dropped? “This is madness!” I say out loud. But inside the crazy nerd declares, “No, this is Sparta!” and makes it work.

So here I am enjoying my life so much, I feel guilty most of my waking hours. It’s called work isn’t it, drudgery, miserable, horrible 9 to 5 torture. So I fake it, complain that it’s hard or tedious. That’s what you say so no one knows how friggin awesome your job really is and tries to take it.

Oh, and 600 grit sandpaper makes wood way smoother than a baby’s butt, even if it is only poplar.